There is a great line of women stretching out behind you into the past, and you have to seek them out and find them in yourself and be conscious of them.

The art of living in a small town is one of the most difficult to acquire.

Parents should leave books lying around marked "forbidden" if they want their children to read.

I hate to sound clichéd, but I do see life as a journey. How else can you see it?

we have not yet developed a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination.

Advice to young writers? Always the same advice: learn to trust our own judgment, learn inner independence, learn to trust that time will sort the good from the bad– including your own bad.

[On her mother:] I was in nervous flight from her ever since I can remember anything, and from the age of fourteen I set myself obdurately against her in a kind of inner emigration from everything she represented. Girls do have to grow up, but has this battle always been so implacable?